Stories by Helen Bradley

A word processor is indispensable for anyone who creates documents, be it for work, school, or writing angry letters to your representatives in Congress. Now that Microsoft has finally released Office 2013 to the general public, we're naming what we think are the 10 best new features in Word 2013. (We reviewed the whole enchilada last December, when it became available to Microsoft TechNet subscribers. You can read our opinion here.)

See how Microsoft's popular applications are changing along with the Windows OS

This is a heady time for Microsoft as it rolls out an ambitious OS and polishes off its productivity suite, billed as "the new Office."

Tables are a Word tool that everyone needs to use at some point to organize otherwise unruly text and numbers. From timetables to rosters to invoices to calendars, all kinds of projects are based on tables.

Much of the data that you use Excel to analyze comes in a list form. You might need to sort the data, filter it, sum it, and perhaps even chart it. Excel tables provide superior tools for working with data in list form.

High-end desktop publishing programs, such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress, feature lots of tools to help designers produce stunning pages. But these programs are expensive, and novices require training to use them, factors that render their acquisition difficult to justify for most small businesses.

If you own a version of Microsoft Office that includes Access (Office Professional 2010 is the most current version), but you’ve never used it, you’re overlooking a powerful tool for organizing and analyzing business data. I’ll show you how to make the most of this relational database program.

Microsoft Word has lots of features that make creating ebooks easy. You can use styles to format an ebook or update its formatting to work on a different platform. You can use the References tool to create a table of contents automatically. And you can produce a design template that's ready for repeated use, so you can spend more time creating content and less time futzing with layouts. Once you've mastered these steps, you can create great ebooks effortlessly. I'll show you how.

Microsoft Excel spreadsheets hold more than a million rows of data and automate number crunching, but they can do so much more. Excel's simple interface lends itself to uses well beyond those that its designers ever imagined.